Life on The Fast Lane (aka Marge's Choice)

I recently came across a wonderful quote from Tippi Hedren: "I don’t ever deal with age or any particular age, I never have. I don’t think I ever will...I feel just as young as I did when I was, you know, doing the films and whatever. I refuse to acknowledge it, frankly.” I think that's a great outlook. You can't stop the passage of time, so be like Tippi and don't let it define you. I intend to follow Tippi's advice...a little later on down the line. Right now I really do need to make a thing about the fact that I just turned 34. Why does that strike me as such a milestone? Probably because it's the same age that Marge Simpson turned in the series' ninth episode, "Life on The Fast Lane" (7G11), which first aired on March 18th 1990. I'm officially as old as Marge Simpson. Which is doubly surreal given that The Simpsons has been around for almost as long as my lifetime. When I first saw this episode, 34 would have seemed too far into the future to even bear thinking about. To quote Edna Krabappel, where does the time go?

Viewers are often surprised, and a little freaked out, to learn that Homer and Marge are as young as they are. For a while, Homer's age was officially given as 36, although this was upped to 38 by the Season 8 episode "The Homer They Fall". For me, this never really came as much of a revelation; mid to late 30s is honestly where I would peg Homer and Marge (sure, Homer doesn't exactly look as if he's in the prime of his life, but then that's kind of the joke - he isn't exactly aging gracefully due to his extreme lack of self-care). No, the one that I really can't get my head around is Jay Sherman from The Critic (and The Simpsons episode "A Star Is Burns"), who is professedly 36. If Jay's 36 then I'm the King of Siam. Sorry, but I cannot accept that character as being any younger than his early-mid-40s. The first time he referred to himself as 36 I laughed out loud because I figured he couldn't possibly be serious. Then we had the episode where he suspects Doris of being his biological mother, and the figure 36 is apparently confirmed as genuine (if he's serious about finding his birth parents, then you'd think he'd at least have to be truthful about that much). Actually, I suspect that Jay was originally conceived as being a lot older, only they lowered his age in the hopes of making him more relatable to the young adult crowd they were primarily courting - which was all in vain because the series utterly bombed with that demographic (a fact the show's producers are entirely upfront about in the DVD commentaries).

Marge Simpson is a great character. That much I do not consider open to debate. I'd even go so far as to posit that she's the most underrated character in the entire series. To an extent, she's the kind of character that I think you have to grow into. When you're a kid, odds are that you'll respond to Homer's loud, goofy antics and, depending on what kind of a tyke you are, you might relate either to Bart's anarchic energy or to Lisa's quiet precociousness. Marge, though, works at perhaps too subtle and understated a level to hold your attention when you're of the sugar cereal set. Her humour is too muted, her characterisation too unassumingly pathos-driven. To put it bluntly, I think to have experienced some of life's crushing disappointments firsthand before you can truly identify with Marge. She's a character who's clearly suffered a ton of disillusionment, and is intermittently cracking from the strain of having to keep on smiling through it all. Of course, to the rest of the Simpsons clan, Marge is utterly indispensable. To use a tired metaphor, she is the emotional glue holding her family together; there's no doubt that she loves her husband and kids and would do anything for them. But at the same time, it's painfully obvious that Marge's life isn't very fulfilling and that her younger self had dreams, ambitions and aspirations that haven't been realised. She puts her heart and soul into her chaotic family's upkeep, often without thanks or acknowledgement. And she doesn't have much of an outlet outside of her family, having no regular employment and only the vaguest semblance of a social life. Her life as a wife, mother and homemaker effectively defines her, yet it's clear that Marge longs to be something more. In some respects, her plight echoes that of her older daughter Lisa - both are sad, misunderstood and frequently ignored by their peers. Only Lisa is eight years old and still has her life ahead of her, whereas Marge has been around the block and has picked up certain obligations (four of them). Now she's 34 and, as Patty and Selma keenly point out, still has time to turn her life around, if she's willing to ditch Homer.

Certainly, I had to grow older to fully appreciate the brilliance of "Life on The Fast Lane", the first episode to focus specifically on Marge's wishes and feelings. It's such a bitingly understated, adult-orientated drama that I'll confess that found it little more than a snooze as a kid. Now, I consider it to be the second strongest episode of Season 1 ("Krusty Gets Busted" will always be my top choice for obvious reasons) and one of the series' all-time classics. A lot of Simpsons viewers, particularly those raised on the later seasons, are inclined to dismiss the first two seasons or so as "boring". Well, I'm old enough to remember when the first Simpsons episodes were considered cutting edge, a rebellion that it was genuinely exciting to be a part of (even if I was a mite too young to understand what we were rebelling against exactly). Revisiting the first couple of seasons now, I think they hold up just fine, although the tone of the series was obviously quite different back then. Much as the first Ullman shorts suggest a slightly more twisted and surreal cartoon than quickly materialised, so too the earliest episodes in the series proper suggest a more grounded, realistic show based on honest observations about everyday suburban life. "Life on The Fast Lane" in particular lends itself more to drama than comedy; it's far from a humourless experience, but the humour is of a decidedly more subtle, bittersweet nature than would later become customary for the series. John Swartzwelder's script is clearly letting the emotion fuel the story above the gags. The result is an intelligent twenty-two minutes built on carefully crafted characterisation, and its success on the awards front (it netted the series the first of what would be many Emmy victories for Outstanding Animated Program) was very well-deserved. The episode's entrenchment into the modern cultural landscape was confirmed in March 2004, when a cheeky reader wrote into the Dear Abby advice column claiming to be a 34 year old mother of three whose "greedy, selfish, inconsiderate and rude" husband had given her a bowling ball, evidently purchased for his own use, as a birthday present (so flippant was her husband on this point that he'd drilled the holes to fit his own fingers and had even gone so far as to have his name inscribed on it), only she had decided to keep the ball and take up bowling just to spite him, and was now contemplating an affair with her sexy bowling instructor. The column was pulled by the Universal Press Syndicate when a perceptive editor noticed that the scenario bore a striking resemblance to the plot of "Life on The Fast Lane" (too striking to be a coincidence), although a few publications wound up printing it any way. (If you're curious, Abby's advice for Marge was to be entirely honest with her husband about the situation, on the chance it would motivate him to salvage their marriage. More specifically, she suggested that he "might be willing to change back into the man who bowled you over in the first place." I'm not familiar with this Dear Abby, but I'm not sure I'd be inclined to trust the advice of a woman who reduces my marital crisis to such an appalling pun.)

So, "Life in The Fast Lane" opens with Marge turning 34 and Homer presenting her with the most thoughtless gift imaginable, a bowling bowl that has been shamelessly picked out and modified for himself. Out of spite, Marge decides to call Homer's bluff and heads off with her new ball to Barney's Bowl-A-Rama (so called because it was originally intended to be the business of Homer's drinking companion, Barney Gumble, until the writers decided that for Barney to be a successful businessman went beyond all plausibility). Initially, Marge finds herself wildly out of her depth in the world of bowling, but things begin to look up when she encounters Jacques (voice of Albert Brooks, one of my favourite actors/directors), a suave French bowling instructor who offers to coach her at a discount price. Although Marge is nervous about the evident sensuality in Jacques' advances, she comes to terms with the fact that their attraction is mutual and grows ever closer to Jacques, while Homer grows increasingly aware that he and Marge are drifting apart. Jacques is clearly answering a need in Marge that isn't being fulfilled by her marriage to Homer, and not just in his willingness to give gifts that are unambiguously intended for her (in his case a bowling glove perfectly fitted for her own hand, and with her name inscribed on it). Jacques offers a new awakening for Marge, an opportunity to rebuild her life and escape the rut that life with Homer is fast pulling her into. But can Marge really turn her back on the man to whom she's been married for over a decade? The episode climaxes with Marge facing a literal crossroad; one road leads to Homer, to security, stability and the reaffirmation of familial obligations, while the other leads to Jacques, and to something altogether more adventurous, risky and uncertain.

When The Simpsons first debuted, it caused quite a bit of hand-wringing among certain right-leaning circles, who detected an anti-family values subtext to the series (one of the show's most prominent critics was of course the late George H. W. Bush). Much of this early backlash was born of concern that the rebellious, elder-defying Bart, then the show's most popular and heavily-merchandised character, offered a poor role model for impressionable children. Others were turned off by the fact that the Simpsons were such an eccentric unit and seemed entirely at ease with their eccentricities. Certainly, The Simpsons has never depicted family life as being all idyllic and the route to perfect happiness - three out of the original thirteen episodes deal with Homer and Marge's marriage being in a precarious position, the result of what is implied to be years of negligence on Homer's part. "Some Enchanted Evening", which was originally written to be the very first episode, has Marge threatening to leave Homer at the urging of a radio shrink, but there it's used merely as the set-up to the episode, not the central problem in itself. "Homer's Night Out" has Marge temporarily throwing Homer out when a snapshot showing him belly-dancing with a stripper becomes a cult item around Springfield, although that episode is largely sympathetic towards Homer and comes to it from the perspective that his interactions with said stripper, while out of character, were motivated more by euphoria than lust. In this episode, Homer is inexcusably a dick - I mean, I know plenty of people who buy their partners presents they fully intend to use themselves, but I've never encountered any quite so brazen as to have their name inscribed on the item in question. Of course, the inscription later makes the bowling ball the perfect metaphor for Homer himself, when Jacques observes that Marge's fingers are too "slender", "feminine" and "tapered" for the ball she's using and that, "people have senseless attachments to heavy, clumsy things, such as this Homer of yours." Jacques is right, of course. From an outside perspective, Marge's marriage to Homer doesn't make a whole lot of sense - Marge is gentle, intelligent, thoughtful and devoted, whereas Homer is, well, Homer. And yet on some level it does work for them. Like the central relationship from Paul Thomas Anderson's recent Phantom Thread, it's not everyone's cup of tea but it operates in a manner that appears to purposely defy all judgement. It's for this reason that The Simpsons was never quite as radical and subversive as its harshest critics made out - whatever the Simpsons' eccentricities, the family unit is shown to be basically unshakeable, and Homer and Marge always stay together in the end. Such is the paradox of their marriage - we recognise that it's not exactly good for Marge to be with Homer, and yet we can't envision them apart. The fact that Homer and Marge are still married thirty years on has become one of the central symbols of constancy in our increasingly unhinged universe. The world may be going to pieces, but Homer and Marge are still together, so the impending apocalypse can't be too near on the horizon.

Jacques, the desirable devil who could potentially have put an end to that at just the ninth episode, is a strange character. Right from the start, there's an air of unreality to him. In fact, that's pretty much the episode's central gag - with his luscious (albeit wandering) French accent and over-the-top lyricism he seems just a little too cut and pasted right out of an airport romance paperback to be true. Jacques is a perfectly honed stereotype, so that we know right off the bat what kind of trouble is rearing its head. He's every bored housewife's wildest fantasy. But he's also a threat. A threat to Marge and Homer's marriage, a threat to the children's sense of domestic stability, a threat to the show's now-established status quo. He's a complex character because the episode is obligated to tread such a careful middle ground with him. On the one hand, we need to be rooting against this guy. Obviously, we don't actually want Marge to ditch Homer and run off with Jacques, no matter how appealing and how French he is. There is that status quo to be maintained, after all. On the other hand, he has to be basically likeable. We need to understand exactly why Marge would enjoy spending time with this man and why he represents such a refreshing alternative to her inconsiderate oaf of a husband. On the surface, Jacques is everything that Homer isn't - he's handsome, romantic, exotic and articulate. And he and Marge do have a great rapport - take the scene where Jacques resourcefully deflects the prying attentions of resident gossip-vulture Helen Lovejoy (making her debut appearance), who spots Jacques and Marge out in public together and insists on making a scene of it, after which he wittily remarks to Marge, "You have a lovely friend there. Let's hope something runs her over." Jacques is seemingly a cool guy, and yet he remains an enigma throughout, in that the viewer is never really sure if they can trust him. He's blatantly astute enough to read the signs and recognises Marge as a sensitive soul trapped in a bland and unfulfilling marriage, but it's not clear just how pure his own intentions are on this matter. Does he come to Marge with a sincere desire to be her knight in shining armor, or is he just a predatory sleaze slowly and patiently moving in for the kill? The latter is teased, fleetingly, when Jacques barks out an order for onion rings (right after some heavily-charged arousal talk between himself and Marge upon the lanes) and momentarily loses his accent and gentility, suggesting that perhaps the whole French Casanova guise is but a ruse designed to increase his seduction prospects (the episode even opens by warning us to be wary of fake continental products - Bart has purchased his mother a four dollar bottle of "French perfume", which he naively believes to have been imported all the way from Paris). Perhaps he is too good to be true, and Marge is just waiting to have her fantasies ruptured by some disturbing, or at least disappointing reality. Perhaps. The biggest problem with Jacques is that, in the end, he constitutes too much of a risk. He's very much caught up in the heat of the present and never indicates where he sees their relationship heading after his proposed night of passion. Is this all just a fling to him, or could he actually offer Marge a viable future?

"Life on The Fast Lane" has not just one but two sequences which evoke both the stifling predictability but also the warm security of married life. The first occurs at The Signing Sirloin, the gimmicky steakhouse where Patty and Selma have taken Marge for her birthday dinner, at which we see waiters regaling the patrons at adjacent tables through various rites of passage - marriage, pregnancy, then death. The subtle implication is that Marge's life is now very much set in stone and that she has few surprises to look forward to as she sees in birthday after birthday and finally shuffles off this mortal coil. The second, considerably less subtle examples occurs at the climax, where Marge is driving to Jacques' apartment, only to be barraged by images of happy couples, reminding her of the gravity of marital commitment, and of what she could potentially be throwing away if she follows her girlish heart to Jacques. Again, we see couples at all stages in life, from the freshly wed to the gracefully aged, to a couple buried in adjacent tombs at a graveyard (the sequence even goes a step further with this gag and shows us a couple of decomposed skeletons - well, costumes in a fancy dress store - positioned side by side). To ensure that Marge gets the message, each tableau is accompanied by a road sign commanding her to STOP. A divine pinspotter may have placed Marge and Jacques together, but it's obvious which side the universe as a whole ultimately favours in this triangle.

What makes "Life on The Fast Lane" so effective on the drama front is the fact that everybody knows about Marge's pending infidelity. Homer knows, Lisa knows, Bart knows, although he does not care to face up to his knowing right away. The only family member who doesn't seem particularly fussed by the events of this episode is Maggie. When Marge starts spending all her evenings at  the alley and it falls on Homer to provide nightly dinner for the kids (invariably some kind of takeout), the knock-on effect on the overall domestic atmosphere is less disproportionate than in later episodes where Marge is removed from the equation (eg: "Marge in Chains", "$pringfield" and "Bart After Dark", all of which show the household descending into a flat-out wilderness under Homer's guidance). Rather, it happens entirely at the emotional level; there's an obvious disturbance in the status quo, and everyone fears this may be the beginning of the end. What makes it so withering, and so painful to watch, is that nobody can quite bring themselves to the point where they're able to talk about it, a problem best summarised in a line from Bart, who recalls his father once advising him that: "When something's bothering you and you're too stupid to know what to do, just keep your fool mouth shut; at least that way you won't make things worse." "Life on The Fast Lane" is an episode built on unspoken tension - the unspoken sexual tension between Marge and Jacques and the unspoken psychological tension as the family sense their unity subtly disintegrating but feel powerless to stem it. It's in this vast assortment of unsaids that the episode roars with incredible force; I am reminded of the playwright Harold Pinter's observations that there are two kinds of silences: "One where no word is spoken. The other when perhaps a torrent of language is being employed...The speech we hear is an indication of that which we don't hear. It is a necessary avoidance, a violent, sly, anguished or mocking smokescreen which keeps the other in its place." The most obvious example of this occurs in the third act, when Homer makes a sincere attempt to implore Marge to stay with him by complimenting her on her sandwich-making techniques; it's so a mundane a compliment as to seem utterly inept, but it's as articulate as Homer can possibly be under the circumstances. This is the closest that Homer and Marge get to confronting one another about their now unavoidable marital crisis - by now, not only does Homer know, but Marge knows that Homers knows. That this unbearable anguish is conveyed through something as banal as talk of peanut butter and jelly is a testament to just how sharp and intelligent the show's writing was straight from the go. In fact, I struggle to think of a scene in the succeeding seasons that even comes close rivaling this one in the gut-wrenching stakes.

Of the family, Lisa makes the most forward attempt to articulate her concerns, when she confides in Bart her suspicions that the ostensibly wonderful lunches Marge has prepared for them may just be the manifestations of a guilty conscience; Marge is overcompensating because she feels bad about her attraction to Jacques diverting her attention from the family. A running gag from early on in the series was Lisa's tendency to comment on family life from a child's perspective using the jargon of a psychotherapist ("Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire" contains another classic example), as if she was consciously anticipating the many years of psychotherapy that awaited her further down the line (the Season 2 episode "Dead Putting Society" even closes on a punchline where Lisa makes this gag in unusually explicit terms). Lisa's sad admission that she's read about this and is well-versed in recognising the signs would imply that she's seen it coming for a while now. Meanwhile, Bart's abruptly aggressive response to his sister's suggestion that he too can read the signs but is in denial would appear to confirm just how deeply affected he is by his new diet of takeout pizza and hoageys; on the surface, he might think that he and Lisa are "making out like bandits", but on an intuitive level he understands that the something in their universe is being tipped dangerously out of whack. Watching the ordinarily too-cool-for-school Bart descend into an unbridled panic when he sees his father collapsing in a barely-responsive, clinically depressed heap is just as troubling, in its way, as Homer's aforementioned peanut butter plea.

If "Life on The Fast Lane" has one real weakness, it's in the inevitably pat conclusion. Obviously, Marge chooses Homer over Jacques, and the final sequence celebrates the reaffirmation of their marital bond with an affectionate tip of the hat to the ending of Taylor Hackford's 1982 film An Officer and a Gentleman (complete with Homer carrying Marge off into the sunset to the strains of Jack Nitzsche's theme, which also provided the basis for the song "Up Where We Belong" by Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes). It gives a superficially upbeat closing note to what has otherwise been a melancholic, emotionally trying experience. That's all sweet and lovely, but I'm not a fan of the fact that Jacques receives zero closure in all of this. Given all the time we've spent watching his interactions with Marge grow more and more intimate, I think at the very least he deserved a scene in which Marge formally breaks it off with him, instead of just leaving him hanging like that (I hope that she at least had the courtesy to do this off of screen). I think that this would have been preferable from a narrative perspective, but I suppose it also comes down to the fact that I like Jacques, and I do think that he and Marge would make a great couple in a parallel universe. In this one, it clearly wasn't meant to be. Marge goes the safe route, sticking with the man in whom she's invested more than a decade of her life, over leaping into the abyss with the handsome relative stranger whose devotions have yet to be proven. Jacques gave her a welcome taste of an alternative lifestyle, but ultimately Marge decides that it must stay at the flirtation level, and backs out before she does any irreversible harm to her marriage to Homer. She makes what is unquestionably the right decision for her family, who were going to pieces amid her divided loyalties. But does she make the right decision for herself? It's a question that the ostensibly triumphant ending seems determined not to answer, drowning out all of our lingering queries in so much Jack Nitzche. For now Marge decides that, whatever his failings, she loves her inept oaf of a husband too much to risk hurting him. It's an undeniably sweet conclusion, but maybe there's a degree of resignation in it too (after all, it's not as if things are going to be any better for Marge in subsequent seasons). But that's what makes the final sequence, for all its glibness, so authentically poignant - this is blatantly not a decision that Marge has made lightly, and there's an obvious element of sacrifice on her part. What "Life on The Fast Lane" examines in painstaking detail is the myriad of messy feelings and heartbreak that accompany the breakdown of any long-term relationship, even those that have reached a point where they probably should end. Even if it does take the easy way out, you can't accuse this episode of pulling its punches in that regard.

"Life on The Fast Lane" was revisited in Season 6, as part of a clip show in which the family reminisce on past romances (back then, the series was obligated by the network to produce the occasional clip show, and the churlishly unimaginative title, "Another Simpsons Clip Show", tells us just how delighted the show's staff were at the prospect). I like Marge's admission that the story isn't ideal as it requires you to mentally snip out the fact that she already has a husband (and of course I love her wry observation, when reflecting on the outcome of her borderline affair with Jacques, that "it was just as well I drove down that ironic street"), but Homer's reaction does annoy me, since it implies that he's learning about Jacques for the first time, when "Life on The Fast Lane" itself makes it painfully obvious that he knew what was going on. He saw the glove and put two and two together (that was the whole purpose of the peanut butter and jelly exchange, was it not?). But then of course Homer wasn't quite so dumb back then. Perhaps his reaction is meant to be an indication of just how severely his brain cells had deteriorated in a mere six seasons. As for Jacques, he's made the odd non-speaking cameo since "Life on The Fast Lane", notably in the Season 7 episode "Team Homer", where he competed in the local bowling championships as part of the team The Home-Wreckers (wittily, his teammates consisted of Mindy Simmons, Princess Kashmir and Lurleen Lumpkin, characters who had all threatened to come between Homer and Marge in previous episodes). He also made an appearance in the "Do The Bartman" music video, where he danced with several female Springfieldians, and Karl (Homer's one-time, Harvey Feirstein-voiced personal assistant). But we would never again experience the kind of in-depth intimacy with the character as we do here, and I regret that (although I suppose I should be grateful that my favourite character became a recurring regular; Bob too was originally envisioned as a one-off character, custom-created for the purposes of "Krusty Gets Busted").

Much as Jacques represents a road not taken for Marge, there's an extent to which "Life on The Fast Lane" represents a road not taken for the series as a whole. As The Simpsons developed, it would gradually move away from the kind of drama-driven narrative exemplified here and become a wilder, more gag-orientated show. Would the series have achieved mass popularity if every episode had been as emotionally downbeat as this one? Probably not. Sometimes these sacrifices have to be made. Like Marge, we ultimately can't follow Jacques, although he sure as heck did give us a passionate time while it lasted. And we'll always have brunch.

I ship it.